Crunching abs… and data.

Gyroscope Is The Creepiest Tracker Yet… But I Still Want To Join

Screenshot of Gyroscope, a new website that combines your data to provide a complete picture of you.

Gyroscope would be House of Cards’ Rachel’s worst nightmare – the website tracks all your data and shares it publicly on the Internet. Learn more for this week’s #FitnessFriday.

Gyroscope is not a wearable or an app, but it uses information from your wearables and other smartphone applications to give yourself, and the rest of the Internet if you so choose, a complete picture of you. It reveals where you are now, what you’ve been doing, as well as your health and life stats from your devices.

Founder and CEO Anand Sharma started the concept as a personal project under the domain April Zero. It is a site he created to learn more about himself and make himself a healthier and happier human (sound familiar Reebok?).

The thing is, he made the data public. As I’m writing this, he is at his home, which is located at latitude 37.77793 and longitude -122.432433. I can see that he’s visited cafes six times thus far during the month of March, and I can also view the names of the cafes and the exact days and times he was there. I can see that on Sunday, March 1, he woke up in the wee hours of the morning for a day-long ski trip.

Is it too much public information? While I may think so, many do not. After launching a new version of April Zero, Sharma got so much interest from people wanting their own sites that he decided to make the platform public under the name of Gyroscope.

Gyroscope automatically sets your information to private, probably because Sharma realizes that many people don’t want the whole Internet to know where they are and what they’re doing. You can still make your information completely public if you so choose.

The website breaks your life into “stories,” so you can see and analyze how you spend your time. It also breaks down your life into three categories:
1. Sport – health and fitness tracking
2. Explorer – adventures around the world
3. Digital – photos and other media

Gyroscope is compatible with many popular apps, including Moves, Instagram, Fitbit, Up, and RunKeeper.

I love the idea of being able to track everything about myself, and, yes, I did sign up to get early access to the site. Right now I don’t think there’s a better designed way to track your patterns, see your progress, and analyze where there’s room for improvement.

But I still have concerns. For instance, personal safety if the data gets hacked and released. I may be paranoid — but am I really?

If you want to give Gyroscope a try, like I do, you’ll have to get in line. The website is currently testing, so you’ll have to sign up for early access to see if the program is as great and/or terrifying as it sounds.